IT was scarcely in nature that the appearance of her betrothed, coming so suddenly in the midst of her thoughts, should be disagreeable to Winifred, but it was an embarrassment to her, and rather added to than lessened the trouble on her mind. He led her back into the park, which she had been coming out of, scarcely knowing where she wandered. As was his way when they were beyond the reach of curious eyes, he took her arm instead of offering her his. There was something more caressing, more close in this manner of contact. When they were safe beyond all interruption, he bent over her tenderly.
“Something is the matter,” he said.
“Nothing new, Edward.”
“Only the trouble of yesterday, Tom’s going away?”
“It is not the trouble of yesterday. It is a trouble which lasts, which is going on, which may never come to an end. I don’t think you can say of any trouble that it is only of yesterday.”
“That is very true; still, you and I are not given to philosophising, Winnie, and I thought there might be some new incident. I suppose he sails to-day?”
“Yes, he sails to-day: and when will he come back again? Will he ever come back? The two of them? Oh, Edward, life is very hard, very different from what one thought.”
“At your age people are seldom so much mixed up in it. But there is the good as well as the bad.”
“Perhaps,” said the girl, faltering, “I am looking through spectacles, not rose-coloured, all the other way. I don’t see very much of the good.”
He pressed her arm close to his side.
“Am not I a little bit of good; is not our life all good if it were only once begun?”
“But what if it never begins?”
“Winnie!” he cried, startled, standing still and drawing her suddenly in front of him so that he could look into her face.
“Oh, Edward, don’t add to my troubles; I don’t see how it is ever to begin. My father means to put me in Tom’s place, as he put Tom in George’s place, and already he has said”—
“What has he said?”
“Perhaps it means nothing,” she went on after a pause; “I should have kept it to myself.”
“Winnie, that is worse than anything he can have said. What he says I can bear, but not that you should keep anything to yourself.”
“It was not much. It was a sort of a threat. He said the match that was good enough for Winnie might not be good enough for”—
“His heiress. He is right enough,” young Langton said.
At this, Winifred, who had been anticipating in her own mind all that was involved, trembled as if it had never occurred to her before, and turned upon him with an air, and indeed with the most real sentiment of grieved surprise.
“Right?” she said, with wonder and reproach in her voice.
“A country doctor,” said the young man, “a fellow with nothing, is not a match for the heiress of Bedloe. He is right enough. We cannot contradict him. You ought to make an alliance like a princess with some one like yourself.”
“I did not think,” said Winnie, raising her head with a flush of anger, “that you would have been the one to make it all worse.”
He smiled upon her, still holding her closely by the arm. “Did you think I had not thought of that before now? Of course, from his point of view, and, of course, from all points of view except our own, Winnie”—
“I am glad you make that exception.”
“It is very magnanimous of me to do so, and you will have to be all the more good to me. I am not blind, and I have seen it all coming, from the moment of Tom’s failure. Why was he so silly as to fail, when a hundred boobies get through every year?”
“Poor Tom!” she said, with a little gush of tears.
“Yes; poor Tom! I suppose he never for a moment thought—But, for my part, I have seen it coming. I have seen for a long time what way the tide was turning. At first there was not much thought of you; you were only the little girl in the house. If it had not been so, I should have run away, I should not have run my head into the net, and exposed myself to certain contempt and rejection. But I saw that nobody knew there was in the house an angel unawares.”
“Edward, you make me ashamed! You know how far I am”—
“From being an angel? I hope so, Winnie. If I saw the wings budding, I should get out my instruments and clip them: it would be a novel sort of an operation. I thought their ignorance was my opportunity.”
She was partly mollified, partly alarmed. “You did not think all this before you let yourself—care for me, Edward?”
“I did before I allowed myself to tell you that I—cared for you, as you say. One does not do such a thing without thinking. There was a time when I thought that I must give up the splendid practice of Bedloe, with Shippington into the bargain; the rich appointment of parish doctor, the fat fees of the Union”—
“You can laugh at it,” she said, “but it is very, very serious to me.”
“And so it is very, very serious to me. So much so that six months ago I wanted to throw everything up, if you would only have consented to come with me, and seek our fortune, I did not mind where”—
“Ah!” she said. There was in the exclamation a world of wistful meaning. What an escape it would have been from all after peril! Winifred said this with the slight shiver of one who sees the means of safety which she could never have taken advantage of.
“But now,” he said, “it is too late for that.”
His tone of conviction went to Winifred’s heart like a stone. She would never have consented to it; but yet why did he say it was too late? She gave him a wistful glance, but asked no question. To do so would have been contrary to her pride and every feeling. They went on for a few minutes in silence, she more cast down than she could explain—he adding nothing to what he had said. Why did he add nothing? Things could not be left now as they were, without mutual explanation and decision what they were to do. Too late? She felt in her heart, on the contrary, that now was the only moment in which it could have been done, in which she could have wound herself up to the possibility—if it were not for other possibilities, which, alas! would thrust themselves into the way.
“I have something to tell you,” he said, “something which you will think makes everything worse. I might have kept you in ignorance of it, as I have been doing; but the knowledge must come some time, and it will explain what I have said”—
She withdrew a little from him, and drew herself up to all the height she possessed, which was not very much. There went to her heart a quick dart like the stab of a knife. She thought he was about to tell her that his own mind had changed, or that her coming wealth and importance had made it incompatible with his pride to continue their engagement. Something of this kind it seemed certain that it must be. In the sudden conviction of the moment it did not occur to Winifred that such a new thing could scarcely be told while he held her so closely to him, and clasped her hand and arm so firmly. But it was not a moment for the exercise of reason. She did not look up, but she raised her head instinctively and made an effort to loosen her hand from his clasp. But of these half-involuntary movements he took no note, being fully occupied with what was in his mind.
“Winnie,” he said in a serious voice, “your father talks at his ease of making wills and changing the disposition of his property. I don’t suppose he thinks for a moment how near he may be—how soon these changes may come into effect.”
A little start, a little tremor ran through her frame. Her attitude of preparation for a blow relaxed. She did not understand what he meant in the relief of perceiving that it was not what she thought.
“My father? I don’t understand you, Edward.”
“No, I scarcely expected you would. He looks what people call the picture of health.”
She started now violently and drew her arm out of his in the shock of the first suggestion. “My father!” she stammered—“the picture of health—you do not mean, you cannot mean”—
“I have been cruel,” he said, drawing tenderly her arm into his. “I have given you a great shock. My darling, it had to be done sooner or later. Your father, though he looks so well, is not well, Winnie. I never was satisfied that he got over that illness as he thought he did. But even I was not alarmed for a long time. Now for several months I have been watching him closely. If he does not make this new will at once, he may never do it. If he does, it will not be long before you are called on to assume your place.”
“Edward! you do not mean that my father—You don’t mean that there is absolute danger—to his life—soon—now? Edward! you do not think”—
“Dear, you must show no alarm. You must learn to be quite calm. You must not betray your knowledge. It may be at any moment—to-day, to-morrow, no one can tell. It is not certain—nothing is certain—he may go on for a year.”
The light seemed to fail in Winifred’s eyes. She leant against her lover with a rush and whirl of hurrying thoughts that seemed to carry away her very life. It was not the awful sensation of a calamity from which there is no escape, such as often overwhelms the tender soul when first brought face to face with death; but rather a horrible sense of what that doom would be to him, the cutting off of everything in which, so far as she knew, he took any pleasure or ever thought of. The idea of a spiritual life beyond would not come into any accordance with her consciousness of him. Mr. Chester was one of those men whom it is impossible to think of as entering into rest, or attaining immediate felicity by the sudden step of death. There are some people whom the imagination refuses to connect with any surroundings but those of prosaic humanity. They must die, too, like the most spiritually-minded; but there comes upon the soul a sensation of moral vertigo when we think of them as entering the life of an unseen world. This, though it may seem unnatural to say so, was the first sensation of Winifred, a sense of horror and alarm, an immediate realisation of the terrible inappropriateness of such a removal. What would become of him when removed from earth, the only state of existence with which he had any affinities? It sent a shiver over her, a chill sense of the unknown and unimaginable which seemed to freeze the blood in her veins. It was only when she recovered from this that natural feeling gained utterance. She had leant against her lover in that first giddiness, with her head swimming, her strength giving way. She came slowly back to herself, feeling his arm which supported her with a curious beatific sense that everything was explained between him and her, mingled with the sensation of natural grief and dismay.
“I do not feel as if it could be possible,” she said faintly. Then, with trembling lips, “My father?” and melted into tears.
“My dearest, it is right you should know. It is for this reason I have tried to persuade you not to go against him in anything. The more tranquillity he has, the better are his chances for life. Let him do as he threatens. Perhaps if you withdraw all opposition he will delay the making of another will, as almost all men do—for there seems time enough for such an operation, and nothing to hurry for. Get him into this state of mind if you can, Winnie. Don’t oppose him; let it be believed that you see the justice of his intention, that you are willing to do what he pleases.”
“Even”—she said, and looked up at him, pausing, unable to say more.
He took both her hands in his, and looked at her, smiling. “Even,” he said, “to the length of allowing him to believe that you have given up a man that was never half good enough for you; but who believes in you all the same like heaven.”
“Believes in me—when I pretend to give up what I don’t give up, and pretend to accept what I don’t accept? Is that the kind of woman you believe in?” she cried, drawing away her hands. “How can I do so? How can I consent to cheat my father, and he perhaps—perhaps”—
She stood faltering, trembling, crying, but detaching herself with nervous force from his support, in a passion of indignation and trouble and dismay.
He answered her with a line in which is the climax of heart-rending tragedy, holding out to her the hands from which she had escaped—
“Faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.”
“That may do for poetry,” she said; “but for me, I am not great enough or grand enough to—to—to be able to brave it. Edward, do not ask me. I must tell the truth. If I tried to do anything else, my face, my looks would betray me. Oh, don’t be so hard on me. Ask me something less than this, ask me now to”—
She stopped terror-stricken, not knowing what she had said; but he only looked at her tenderly, shaking his head. “If I had ever persuaded you to that,” he said, “I should have been a cad and a rascal, for it would have broken your heart. But now I should be worse—I might be a murderer. Winnie, you must yield for his sake. You must let him live as long as God permits.”
“And deceive him?” she said, almost inaudibly. “Oh, you don’t know what you are asking of me! You are asking too much cleverness, too much power. I can only say one thing or another. I cannot be falsely true.”
“You can do everything that is necessary, whatever it may be, for those you love,” he said.
She stood faltering before him for a moment, turning her eyes from one side to the other, as if in search of help. But there was nothing that could give her any aid. The heavens seemed to close in above her, and the earth to disappear from under her feet. If she had ever consented to an untruth in her life, it had been to shield and excuse her brothers, for whom there were always apologies to be made. And how to deceive she knew not.
They went on together across the park, not noticing the wetness of the grass or the threatening of the sky, upon which clouds were once more blowing up for rain, so much absorbed in their consultation that they were close to the house before they were aware, and started like guilty things surprised when Mr. Chester came sharply upon them round a corner, buttoned up to the chin, and with an umbrella in his hand.